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Taylor Swift and the team she has surrounded herself with are marketing geniuses, and they know how to drum up a lot of conversation about whatever she is working on at the moment, and they are currently proving just how good they are at what they do this week before she launches the next era of her career—or at least that's how it seems.

Swift is currently busy repopulating both her Instagram and Twitter profiles with short videos that come with absolutely no explanation, which makes them delightfully mysterious. Yesterday, the Grammy winner uploaded a glitchy 10-second clip of what appeared to be a snake moving ever so slightly, and today, she followed that up with a 20-second treatment that looks almost exactly the same. Neither of these posts were explained in any way by the singer or her team, and they didn’t come with any captions that might be helpful for the millions of fans who were immediately intrigued.

The signs that something big was on the way began last week when the country-turned-pop star deleted everything she had ever uploaded to both her Twitter and her Instagram, and while that might not gain much attention for the average person, everything Swift does becomes a headline these days. With 102 million followers on Instagram and 85 million on Twitter, it’s not surprising that a big move like the one she pulled off late last week garnered as much speculation as it has, or that she has quickly followed it up with something even more thrilling to those who follow her.

While plenty of people expressed their thoughts when Swift initially deleted her posts on both platforms, things started to become really exciting when these reptilian clips were uploaded, and speculation is now running rampant. The most recent 20-second upload only needed 45 minutes to rack up one million views on Instagram, and it is being spread across Twitter like wildfire, which suggests that whatever all of this is leading up to will be instantaneously greeted by tens or even hundreds of millions of people watching and listening.

It looks like these videos featuring snakes may be teasers for an upcoming video, which is supported by the fact that longtime Swift collaborator and music video director Joseph Kahn, who worked with the pop star on visuals for singles like “Blank Space,” “Out Of The Woods” and “Bad Blood,” which won the pair a Grammy, has been retweeting the singer’s messages, suggesting he is involved in whatever is coming next.

Swift has been relatively quiet for some time now, staying out of the spotlight as much as is possible for a woman as popular and powerful as she is, and this seems like the perfect time to begin the next phase of her successful career. She did earn a top 10 hit earlier this year with her Zayn collaboration “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever,” which peaked at No. 2, but other than that, fans have been patiently waiting for #TS6, her as-yet-unnamed and unannounced sixth album, which is expected to follow in the poppy footsteps of her blockbuster release 1989.

It has been just over three years since she officially made the switch to pure pop by dropping “Shake It Off” in the summer of 2014, and she isn’t known for waiting long periods of time in between album cycles. With these two new suggestions of a video, her refreshing of all social channels and the fact that it’s been a long time (at least when it comes to Top 40 pop music) since she has promoted anything properly, all signs point to the fact that Taylor Swift will be dropping new music, and it’s probably going to happen very, very soon.

I am a freelance music journalist based in New York City. My byline has appeared in The Huffington Post, Billboard, Mashable, Noisey, The Hollywood Reporter, MTV, Fuse,

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I am a freelance music journalist based in New York City. My byline has appeared in The Huffington Post, Billboard, Mashable, Noisey, The Hollywood Reporter, MTV, Fuse, and dozens of other magazines and blogs around the world. I love following charts and the biggest and most successful names in the industry, and I'm always interested in highlighting incredible feats and discovering what's next.